What about A Man’s Life? On Shogo Uthman’s poetry of African masculinity
Title: A Man’s Life
Author: Shogo Olalekan Uthman
Extent: 54 pages
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Format: Paperback and eBook
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 978-978-62571-2-9
Publication Date: July 2026
Publisher: Noirledge Publishing
Reviewer: ’Joba Ojelabi
In A Man’s Life, Shogo Olalekan Uthman explores the quiet bargains men make with masculinity, responsibility and vulnerability, asking what is lost when endurance becomes an expectation.
Published in 2026 by Noirledge, Shogo Olalekan Uthman paints the picture of a man most people know in his collection of poems. He wakes before dawn, goes to work, pays the bills, takes care of his family and answers when people call. He is dependable because he has learnt that he must be. What is less certain is what happens to him beneath all this usefulness.
This is the territory Uthman explores across the collection. Divided into five sections, A Man’s Life moves through work, emotional restraint, family, anxiety and, eventually, a confrontation with the expectations that have shaped its central figure. In his author’s note, Uthman makes an important distinction: the collection is “not a complaint” but “a witnessing”. It is an appropriate description of a book less interested in spectacular suffering than in the accumulated pressures of ordinary life.
Some of its strongest poems locate these pressures in mundane routines. In “Between Paychecks”, Uthman’s man is suspended “between salary and soul”, wondering whether survival has demanded too much of him. “The Provider” extends this anxiety. Money is understood not by its monetary value, but by what it must become: rent, school needs, food. Providing becomes an expression of devotion until the man works so much that he “vanishes into it”.
It is a revealing formulation. In Uthman’s world, masculinity is often measured through usefulness. A good man provides. A good man remains dependable. A good man continues. The danger is that somewhere between being useful to everyone else and fulfilling these expectations, the individual himself can disappear.
This disappearance also happens emotionally. “Strong Man” offers a succession of instructions: do not cry, do not break, do not falter, do not “feel too much”. Eventually these commandments become bricks, building “a fortress / no one visits”. The image is simple but effective. A fortress offers protection, but it is also a structure of isolation. The very performance intended to make the man invulnerable leaves him unreachable.
The collection becomes more interesting when Uthman considers where such performances begin. “Boy, Don’t Cry” traces emotional restraint back to childhood, presenting hardness as something learnt rather than inherent. Later, in “Sons and Mirrors”, a father recognises the same emotional habits in his son. He wants to interrupt the cycle but discovers that it has become part of him, ingrained “like marrow”. Masculinity here is inheritance: behaviours travelling between generations until nobody quite remembers who first taught them.
Uthman writes these ideas in deliberately uncomplicated language. The poems are generally brief, conversational and immediately accessible. There is little interest in obscurity or elaborate linguistic experimentation. This works particularly well when the simplicity allows an image to carry the argument. In “Respectable”, the public image of the composed professional is reduced to an elegant contrast: people can see his collar, but they cannot see the “choke”.
The same accessibility, however, occasionally limits the collection. Uthman returns frequently to a familiar vocabulary of weight, silence, storms, strength, breaking and hidden suffering. Some poems explain their emotional significance where a little more ambiguity might have allowed the reader to discover it. Consequently, individual poems can sometimes feel less like distinct encounters than reiterations of the collection’s central thesis.
Yet repetition also produces a cumulative effect. The reader encounters the same demand in different rooms: on the commute, at work, in marriage, in fatherhood and in solitude. What initially appears to be one man’s private exhaustion gradually reveals itself as a social script.
Crucially, A Man’s Life does not end by simply celebrating endurance. Its final section, “Silent Wars”, begins to question the silence that earlier poems document. In “The Quiet Rebellion”, the apparently modest act of saying “no” and speaking about fear fractures a chain. “Reckoning” pushes the idea further. Here, the man finally names the weight he carries and accepts fear, softness and exhaustion without interpreting them as failures of masculinity.
This shift gives the collection its most important dimension. Uthman is not simply asking that men receive more applause for carrying their burdens. He is questioning why carrying those burdens silently became evidence of manhood in the first place.
That distinction matters. Without it, A Man’s Life might risk reproducing the very masculine ideal it seeks to interrogate: the noble, suffering man who asks for nothing and somehow keeps going. Instead, its concluding poems gesture towards another possibility, one in which vulnerability does not cancel strength and speaking does not constitute failure.
For all its stylistic simplicity, A Man’s Life raises a complicated question: how much of a man can disappear into being the man everyone needs him to be? Uthman does not pretend to provide a definitive answer. What he offers instead is the act he promises at the beginning: witnessing.
About ’Joba Ojelabi
’Joba Ojelabi is a marketing and communication professional with a passion for storytelling. His work is rooted in a fascination with the power of narratives to connect people, drive change, and create meaning.
Beyond his professional pursuits, ’Joba is invested in the arts, contributing as the Communications Lead at Agbowo (www.agbowo.org), an African literary organization dedicated to amplifying creative voices across the continent.
Based in Lagos, Nigeria, ’Joba leverages his diverse experiences to bridge the worlds of science, marketing, and the arts.
To learn more or connect with ’Joba, visit www.jobaojelabi.com.